Linked List: September 2006

Saturday, 30 September 2006

Which means you still can’t use it to read the members-only feeds from Daring Fireball. They don’t even give you a reasonable error message — when you try to subscribe to a feed that requires HTTP authentication, it tells you there’s “No feed available” for that URL.

“SecureWorks and Apple are working together in conjunction with
the CERT Coordination Center on any reported security issues,”
SecureWorks said in a statement provided to Macworld. “We will not
make any additional public statements regarding work underway
until both companies agree, along with CERT/CC, that it is
appropriate.”

[…]

Maynor and Cache were due to speak at ToorCon this weekend in San
Diego, but Maynor has canceled, SecureWorks confirmed. No reason
was given for the cancellation.

$89 drop-dead-simple display calibrator — works with both CRTs and LCDs, and on Mac OS X and Windows. Works wonders with aging displays that cast off yellowish or pinkish tints. (Via Chris Ryland via email.)

After installing the delta version of this update on an Intel-based Mac, the computer will restart two times — the first restart after installing this update may take several minutes; please allow it to complete.

Andy Ihnatko has been splitting his time 50-50 between Mac and Windows while writing his upcoming iPod book:

But what I’ve endured over the past few months is the
equivalent of a weeklong road trip with someone whose company
you’ve always enjoyed, but never really known as a true
friend. Windows has propped its bare smelly feet up on my
dashboard and told me the story about how he was so hung over
during his aunt’s funeral that he threw up into the coffin a
little. His greasy hair has left smears on the inside of the
window that no solvent can shift.

Thursday, 28 September 2006

If you were on a desert island and you could only take the
following two machines:

(1) A MacPro [sic] with all apps installed with no internet connection

or

(2) A Windows box with an internet connection, Firefox, IM, etc.

And then takes the fact that even die-hard Mac users would choose #2 as proof that “the operating system doesn’t matter anymore”.

That’s like offering someone the choice between a BMW with no gas tank and a Kia with one, and declaring that “the quality of your car doesn’t matter anymore” when people choose the Kia because it’ll actually work.

Matt Deatherage figured out what’s going on after reading the full text of Apple’s cease-and-desist letter — it’s not because Podcast Ready was simply using the word “podcast”, it’s because Podcast Ready was attempting to file for their own trademarks on “podcast ready” and “myPod”:

Apple hasn’t said word one about tens of thousands of people using
the term “podcast,” despite Apple’s “iPod” trademark and its claim
on “Pod” as a portable audio player trademark as well. Apple took
action against Podcast Ready because the firm, formerly known as
Infostructure Solutions, was attempting to trademark the terms
“Podcast Ready” and “MyPodder.” That would mean that other
companies who wanted to use the term “podcast ready” would have to
license it from Infostructure Solutions, even though the term is
obviously and admittedly based on Apple’s “iPod” trademark. Apple
cannot allow companies to register a variant on “myPod” as a
trademark if it’s defending its own “iPod” trademark.

Tom Sherman takes Six Apart to task for the fact that, if you use the “entry_basename” field for customizing entries’ permalink URLs, this field doesn’t get exported or imported — and thus your URLs will all break if you use the Import/Export feature to change web hosts; this, despite the fact that whole point of the entry_basename field is to keep your URLs from breaking when you change a post’s title.

You don’t want to get me started on just how shitty MT’s Import/Export feature are. (E.g. any entry that contains the strings “\n-----\n” (five dashes on a line by themselves) or “\n--------\n” (eight dashes) can’t be exported and re-imported, because those strings are the export format’s field and entry separators. I.e. MT doesn’t escape those strings when they occur with an entry.)

In a nut: You can’t trust Movable Type to import its own export format.

There will also be the option of purchasing individual songs through a system called Microsoft Points. The new Microsoft cash system will work by adding money to an account, as with a prepaid phone card. Points will then be deducted from the account with each purchase. A single song will cost 79 points, “the equivalent of 99 cents,” according to a spokesman for Microsoft.

So they’re creating their own currency? This seems crazy to me.

Update: Apparently they already use this crazy Points currency for Xbox Live stuff. I still say it’s a stupid idea — they obviously hold their customers in contempt, thinking that they’re stupid enough to think that 79 points is “less than” 99 cents even if it costs 99 cents to buy 79 points.

This has the makings of a disaster. $14.99 a month is too much
for a subscription service. The Zune is incompatible with both
iTunes and every single WMA-based service on the planet. What
the heck are these people thinking?

What I don’t understand is why Microsoft is claiming they expect to lose money on these first-generation Zunes. Apple’s turning a nice profit on the iPod — the Zune has a slightly bigger screen and Wi-Fi and they have to sell it at a loss?

Wednesday, 27 September 2006

I agree: the Lightroom panel is more thoughtfully designed, and I think it looks better, too. The Lightroom team is quite obviously sweating over every little detail. I dig the little flourish at the bottom, too.

Wired’s Listening Post weblog has posted the letter. Looks like they’re more concerned about Podcast Ready’s use of “myPodder” than the “podcast” in their company name. But they’re clearly attempting to assert that they want control over who can use the term “podcast” in a trademark.

Tuesday, 26 September 2006

Looks like a web app re-implementation of the regular Apple Mail UI. This is clever and quite an accomplishment, but I can’t say I think it’s a good idea to make the UI so remarkably similar to the real Apple Mail’s — there are too many people who are going to get confused about why they’re not completely identical. (Via Scott McNulty.)

Greenpeace ups the ante in their crusade against Apple’s use of environmentally-unsavory materials in Macs and iPods. Their FAQ makes it clear that they’re not targeting Apple because Apple has a particularly bad record in this regard, but because “Apple should be setting the trend for a green future. If any company should do this it’s Apple.”

Let’s first break down impossibleness. For the sake of this
article, there are two types of impossible tasks. First, there are
impossibly dull tasks. This is work which requires no mental
effort, but is vast in size. Bug scrubbing is a great example of
this. At the other end of the spectrum are impossibly hard tasks.
These are tasks like, “Hey Rands, we need new product by
Christmas. Yes, I know it’s October. Ready. Go!”

Oddly, attacking both boring and hard tasks involve the same
mental kung-fu where your first move is starting.

If you pack a declared firearm — such as a relatively harmless starter pistol — in your checked luggage, you can secure it, along with anything else in the same case, with a lock the TSA can’t open, and TSA will provide additional tracking on the case.

Interesting idea for sponsorship: up to three sponsors per month pay Techmeme to get the most recent post in their RSS feeds included on Techmeme’s front page. It’s not so much advertising as it is a way to pay to reach a large audience from your own weblog. Looks like it pays well, too — at $3,000 - $4,500 a month, that’s about $130K a year.

Problem is, Photoshop isn’t an umbrella brand. At least not to its users. Yah, there’s Photoshop Elements, but we all understand that as a dumbed down version of Photoshop. Lightroom is off the charts in “think different” from Photoshop. Trying to tie it to Photoshop like this is about as smart as, oh, renaming the iPod as the MacPod.

Let’s see: a story centered in Philadelphia, about mysterious street art referencing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that’s not Daring Fireball link material, I don’t know what is.

I’ll just add that I’ve been fascinated by these tiles ever since I moved to Philadelphia, and I noticed a few years ago when new ones started cropping up again. There’s one in the left lane of the Vine Street Expressway, a bit before the merge point with the Schuylkill Expressway, noticeable only when traffic is at a standstill. An insane location for a guerrilla art installation given how fast people drive there when traffic isn’t jammed.

New time-tracking and invoicing app for Mac OS X, with a simple, intuitive task-oriented UI. $20 through October 31, $25 after that. It looks useful for time-tracking individual tasks even if you don’t do work for multiple clients. (Via Daniel Jalkut.)

Free update to Aperture, announced today at a special media event at the Photokina conference in Germany. New features include flexible library management, integration with iLife and iWork apps (i.e. so Aperture users get the same photo library browsing that iPhoto users do) and a whole bunch of new image manipulation features.

On the other end of the Aperture-Lightroom rivalry, Flickr today released an export plug-in for Aperture, written by Frasier Speirs (author of the nifty FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto). Free during the beta, £14 (about US$27 today) after that.

Ou apparently believes that Maynor and Ellch supplied Apple with some combination of packet captures, driver disassemblies, and crash dumps regarding Apple’s AirPort drivers, despite Apple’s statement that Maynor and Ellch “did not supply us with any information to allow us to identify a specific problem.”

As I wrote Thursday, “The only way Maynor and Ellch have any credibility remaining is if Apple is flat-out lying. And if that’s the case Maynor and Ellch can simply step forward and prove it.” According to this comment by Ou, that’s what they plan to do at the ToorCon conference next week.

But I’ve seen a number of people complaining lately that when you download covers they are only cached and stored in a proprietary format. This means that if you copy/move some music the artwork will not be attached to the song. […]

Here’s an easy way to get the artwork into your song files (it’s so simple I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention this yet).

Seems like Apple’s recent cease and desist to “Podcast Ready” is part of a larger struggle to solidify their various “iPod”-related trademark applications. (Via George Saronto Stamas, who has an interesting comment on this post.)

Friday, 22 September 2006

Apple Computer has slapped Podcast Ready with a “cease and desist” letter, claiming that the terms “Podcast Ready” and “myPodder” infringe on Apple’s trademarks, and that they cause confusion among consumers.

Ridiculous. “iPodwhatever”, sure, they own that. But not “Podwhatever” — and certainly not “podcast”, which Apple embraced a year ago as a grassroots movement and term. Apple should drop this.

But several weeks ago, in the midst of rumors that Apple was
close to announcing a deal with Disney, Wal-Mart’s David Porter
— the executive responsible for stocking the retailer’s shelves
with DVDs and CDs and whose influence is so immense in
Tinseltown that he’s been named to Premiere magazine’s annual
power list — made the rounds of Hollywood studios.

His message, according to a studio exec involved in the
discussions: that there would be “serious ramifications” if the
studios hopped in bed with Apple.

“They threatened to hurt us in terms of buying less products,”
said this person.

Last week HP said Hurd would succeed Dunn as chairman following the company’s Jan. 18 board meeting, and that she would remain on the company’s board. But now Dunn will leave the board altogether, the company said.

On the slower levels the game play is ok, but as anyone who’s used a (2G+) iPod knows, the capacitance-based clickwheel is anything but laser-accurate. This means the faster levels are all but impossible since you can’t move the blocks as precisely as with individual button presses. Why they didn’t go with an all-button-based interface is really beyond me.

MacJournals publisher Matt Deatherage is home and recuperating after being hospitalized for congestive heart failure (!). In a weblog entry updating MDJ and MWJ readers about his health (publication is set to resume next week), he offers the following observation regarding Maynor and Ellch’s AirPort claims:

If Maynor and Ellch had demonstrated it or shown code to just
one Mac expert who could have verified their claims, they’d
rightly be lionized for their work. Instead, they took credit
for “hacking a MacBook” at security shows and in the
international press while refusing to provide even the barest
proof that they’d actually accomplished what they said they
had, or at least what they wanted you to believe they’d said.
Now that bugs and fixes are in the real world, there’s no way
of ever knowing if what they say they found matches those bugs
or not — when they had the chance to prove it, they refused.
It’s like saying after the fact that you knew the answer to
Final Jeopardy — you have to say it before it’s revealed to
get credit for knowing it.

Apple today released AirPort Update 2006-001 and Security Update 2006-005, with several AirPort-related fixes. Apple says the issues were uncovered by an internal audit commissioned in the wake of the SecureWorks “MacBook Wi-Fi Hack” drama, but that these issues were not discovered or reported by SecureWorks. From Macworld:

Apple has maintained that SecureWorks has provided no proof that
Mac drivers are vulnerable in any way.

“They did not supply us with any information to allow us to
identify a specific problem, so we initiated an internal audit,”
Apple spokesman, Anuj Nayar, told Macworld. “Today’s update
preemptively strengthens our drivers against potential
vulnerabilities, and while it addresses issues found internally
by Apple, we are open to hearing from security researchers on
how to improve security on the Mac.”

Judging by my email, there’s obviously a lot of confusion about the new 640 × 480 resolution video support in the new iPods (and in the version 1.2 firmware update for older 5G iPods). Here’s the deal: all 5G iPods have displays with 320 × 240 resolution. That’s how many pixels are on the displays. The old firmware only supported video at up to 480 × 480 resolution. The latest firmware — which is what the brand-new iPods come with from the factory, of course — now supports video at up to 640 × 480.

When played back on the iPod, it is downsampled to fit the 320 × 240 screens. When played back on a TV, via the S-video or composite video output of the dock, the video is displayed at the higher resolution.

The Financial Times, 7/11/97: “Apple no longer plays a leading
role in the $200 billion personal computer industry. ‘The idea
that they’re going to go back to the past to hit a big home
run…is delusional,’ says Dave Winer, a software developer.”

While the candy-colors-and-lots-of-transparent-effects cosmetic look-and-feel of Vista is quite obviously inspired by Mac OS X’s Aqua, at a deeper level, Microsoft’s and Apple’s UI design patterns are diverging. It was one thing when Mac menu bars were anchored at the top of the screen and Windows menu bars were tucked under each window’s title bar — that’s just placement. But it’s a deep fundamental shift not to have menu bars at all.

This trend is dangerous for Adobe, methinks — it’s getting less and less tenable for them to continue shipping Mac and Windows apps that are so similar in design. They’re either going to ship Mac versions that don’t feel Mac-like, Windows versions that don’t feel Windows-like, or, both.

Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive Mark V. Hurd approved an elaborate “sting” operation on a reporter in February in an attempt to plug leaks to the media, according to an e-mail message sent by HP Chairman Patricia C. Dunn.

So Dunn was forced to step down as chair of the board as a result of this fiasco, but her replacement as chair, Hurd, was involved too? Jeebus, what a mess.

Brent Simmons on using WebKit to create hybrid web/desktop apps. I think this is one of the most important trends in Mac app development. (Not a new link, but I missed this when it was new last month.)

In many ways, the recording industry is the biggest dupe in the DRM wars. They have repeatedly been sold, and have repeatedly bought heavily into copy-prevention schemes that don’t work, can’t work, and only give more power to the DRM vendor. Why does the record industry always cave in to Steve Jobs’ iTunes pricing model? Because the industry accepts it as a point of faith that they can’t sell music online without DRM, and Steve controls the only DRM recognised by 80% of portable digital music players.

Wednesday, 20 September 2006

QuarkXPress 7.01 (Universal) is significantly slower than version 7.0 (PowerPC only) when running on PowerPC Macs. And even on Intel Macs, 7.01 is slower than InDesign CS2 running through Rosetta. Quark blames Xcode and GCC, but something’s way out of whack here.

In fact, the vast majority of supposedly XHTML documents on the internet are served as text/html. Which means they are not XHTML at all, but actually invalid HTML that’s getting by on the error handling of HTML parsers. All those “Valid XHTML 1.0!” links on the web are really saying “Invalid HTML 4.01!”.

Terrific essay by Adrian Holovaty on how newspapers can remain important:

See the theme here? A lot of the information that newspaper organizations collect is relentlessly structured. It just takes somebody to realize the structure (the easy part), and it just takes somebody to start storing it in a structured format (the hard part).

at least three or four of the times that my powerbook has been declared dead the expert making the declaration was an Apple Genius and the Apple store. each time they would declare it dead, then offer to sell me a nice new computer.

i would decline and then buy a new battery or a new power supply or whatever i thought was the problem. and when i would get it home it would work again. the apple geniuses did not believe in my powerbook, but i did.

Mira lets you use your Apple Remote to control any application; it also supports third-party IR receivers for use on Macs that don’t have one built-in. $16 for the software, or $32 with a bundled USB IR receiver.

The studies, referred to in a Feb. 2 draft report for a briefing of senior management, are said to have included the possibility of placing investigators acting as clerical employees or cleaning crews in the San Francisco offices of CNET and The Wall Street Journal.

If two researchers do a study, and one finds a significant result (tall people earn more money than short people) while the other finds nothing, seeing both studies will make you skeptical of the first paper’s result. But if the only paper you see is the first one, you’ll probably think there’s something to it.

Two things worth noting: (a) that when Yahoo runs AP stories about
itself, there’s no exclamation mark after their own name; and (b)
this quote:

But the prospect of a slowdown in online advertising nevertheless
rattled Wall Street, which has been operating under the assumption
that Internet companies would fare relatively well even in a
sluggish economic environment because of the Web’s rapid overall
growth.

“The Internet, and Yahoo in particular, was supposed to be a safe
haven, so this is a little bit of a ‘Whoops!’ that tends to make
people very nervous,” said American Technology Research analyst
Rob Sanderson.

Tuesday, 19 September 2006

Steven Levy’s Newsweek article on iTV — the article I couldn’t find a link to earlier. (I still say Newsweek’s web site is a turd.) Levy writes:

Is it possible that when iTV ships next year, you may also be able to choose a menu item called Google Video, and then zip through the best of the thousands of user-submitted videos on the search giant’s service? Google’s consumer product chief, Marissa Mayer, tells me that indeed, the two companies are engaged in talks.

Note to the Appleheads: While Steve Jobs may in fact be a
marketing a genius there comes a point when Eskimos will no
longer buy ice. $10-$15 for a poor picture quality movie is a
bad deal. Yes, idiots overpay for things. Yes, there are a lot
of idiots out there and yes Steve Jobs may be able to use the
Obi Wan Kenobi trick voice with some, but I predict this thing
will flop hard. You read it here first.

Prediction noted.

Freeberg’s anti-iTV prediction seems solely predicated on the assumption that it isn’t going to support HD. I don’t believe Apple has said anything about HD one way or the other, though. The downloadable movies from the iTunes Store aren’t HD-quality, but the iTV does have an HDMI output port. Why would Apple include an HDMI port if they weren’t going to support HD in some way?

An independant Danish laboratory tested for the presence of several toxic chemicals, including brominated flame retardants (BFRs), polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC), and even lead, in brand new laptops from five of the world’s leading manufacturers (Acer, Apple, Dell, HP, Sony). HP and Apple laptops contained the highest levels of contamination.

Joel Spolsky is apparently a Markdown and SmartyPants convert. Seems like a minor pain in the ass to get them working with EditPad Pro, though; with BBEdit and TextWrangler, you just copy the .pl files to ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Unix Support/Unix Filters/ and that’s it. (It certainly helps that Mac OS X ships with Perl; Windows XP does not.)

Get up to 100 of your Flickr photos printed on business cards for $20; Flickr Pro users get 10 free. Great idea. Update: I just ordered my free 10-pack, and the UI is just terrific. What a great web app.

This is just sick. HP’s digital cameras offer a built-in “slimming” feature that squishes the image to make women look slimmer. Their examples show two perfectly healthy-looking women in no need of “slimming” — to my eyes they both look better in the original untouched photos. Why not use HP’s CEO Mark Hurd as a model?

This is funny. Creative is cited as a potential buyer for Napster, because it’s “finding its role as an also-ran vendor of digital music and media players under attack by SanDisk”. I.e. they’re losing their fight to remain an “also-ran”.

Fission is a streamlined audio editor designed to get you editing in minutes, not hours. It works with MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF audio, enabling you to instantly trim and split files with no quality loss!

Fission costs $32, but just $18 for registered users of Audio Hijack Pro. I smell a hit.

Andrew Orlowski, at the beginning of a piece for The Register in which he claims the Zune might help Microsoft push more people to subscription-based services:

iTunes dominates the legal download market in the same way the
iPod dominates the MP3 player business. It’s hard to remember
now that for the first year of its life the iPod was a flop. But
once Apple introduced iTunes for Windows, the mass market
perception of the device changed from one of expensive luxury to
convenience item.

In what way was the iPod ever a flop? The iPod started as a Mac-only peripheral. It sold about as well as a $400 Mac-only music player could have possibly sold. Sure, those first-year sales numbers were low compared to the numbers they’ve achieved since then, and the explosive growth only came after they ported iTunes to Windows — but that doesn’t mean Apple wasn’t utterly delighted by the iPod’s first year.

Further: In this piece, Orlowski claims “iTunes doesn’t make money for anyone except Apple”, implying somehow that the record labels aren’t getting a chunk of each sale. If that were the case — if the record companies weren’t making money on iTunes Store sales, why would they continue to allow their catalogs to be sold through iTunes. It’s quite possible that Apple doesn’t turn much of a profit directly from the iTunes Store, but I see no evidence that the record labels don’t.

It’s so strange — and, yes, un-Mac-like — for a menu to just come and go like this depending on your current context that I had assumed for the first few days after iTunes 7 was released that the chapter menu had been completely removed, or, more likely, that it had been omitted by mistake. Unlike a lot of the other criticism regarding iTunes 7’s UI changes, this one is not about cosmetics.

Everything is new. You can now create a membership and upload your photos. Members can directly create the magazine by submitting their work, and voting for other members’ submissions. And then there’s the magazine itself: bigger, fatter, less expensive, more often, and, soon, subscribeable.

By creating a malicious package and setting the authorization level to AdminAuthorization in the package, an attacker can modify root-owned files, execute commands as root, or install setuid-root programs without alerting the user that such actions are taking place. The problem is compounded when you consider that over 90% of Mac OS X users run as the administrator user because it’s what the default user created by the system is.

Public beta of David Watanabe’s upcoming BitTorrent client. Love that Jasper Hauser icon. Update after giving it a tire-kicking:* Looks beautiful, but crashy as hell. I’ll wait for it to get out of beta.

Those briefed on the company’s review of the operation say detectives tried to plant software on at least one journalist’s computer that would enable messages to be traced, and also followed directors and possibly a journalist in an attempt to identify a leaker on the board.

Attempting to plant spyware on someone’s computer is a criminal act, is it not? Patricia Dunn, HP’s chairwoman who initiated the spying, has already been demoted from the chair. But why does she remain on HP’s board at all? Do the other board members — whom she commissioned spying against — support her?

Saturday, 16 September 2006

A Microsoft spokeswoman in Montreal told CanWest News Service that “it was pointed out to us” during focus groups in the province that the proposed brand name sounded much like a French-Canadian term used as a euphemism for penis or vagina.

Check out the screenshot of iTunes 7 in this Apple KnowledgeBase article. It has an entirely different color scheme in the source list — a dark blue background with white text. This is a far more radical change than what they actually shipped. I wonder how late in the game they changed this? I doubt they’d start taking screenshots for the KnowledgeBase until late in the development cycle.

Update: Apple has already replaced the screenshot with one that looks like the shipping version of iTunes 7.0. Good thing I kept this copy.

Friday, 15 September 2006

Kind of crazy if you think about it. There’s a very strong case against paying for DRM-protected media from any vendor, but at least with Apple, the deal seems pretty clear: stick with Apple and the stuff you’ve paid for will continue to play. If Zune really doesn’t play PlaysForSure protected WMV files, what’s the message to people who paid for PlaysForSure songs and want to buy a Zune? “Microsoft: We plan to force you to re-pay for all your music every two or three years?”

This is so insane I can’t believe it’s true. PlaysForSure is Microsoft’s own DRM-licensing program; Zune is Microsoft’s own player, and it’s based on a Toshiba “Gigabeat” player that already is PlaysForSure-compatible. Why wouldn’t it be PlaysForSure compatible?

Microsoft claims Griffin Technology will be producing accessories for the Zune; Griffin spokesperson tells iLounge no deal has been signed:

“As the leading accessory maker for portable media players, Griffin is always interested in evaluating new opportunities,” a Griffin spokesperson told iLounge, “However we continue to focus our efforts on the market leading iPod due to our close relationship with Apple.”

Sort of like asking a girl out for a date, her telling you that she’ll get back to you, and you going out and announcing to your buddies that she said yes.

Doctorow’s caustic analysis of Amazon’s Unbox terms of service is, well, his usual stridency. But he’s correct that you get far fewer rights with an Unbox download than with a DVD purchased from Amazon. He doesn’t mention in it in this essay, but the same goes for iTunes movie downloads, although I think iTunes’s usage rights are better than Unbox’s. My favorite bit is this one, on how entertainment industry executives think:

I once attended a DRM negotiation where an MPAA vice-president
said, “Watching a show that’s being received in one room while
you’re sitting in another room has value, and if it has value,
we should be able to charge money for it.” Siva Vaidhyanathan
calls this the “if value, then right” theory — if something has
value, someone must have a right to sell it. So while you might
be accustomed to extracting unexpected value from your old media
— ripping a CD to play it on your iPod, copying a cartoon and
sticking it on your fridge, taking your books with you when you
move overseas — forget about it from now on.

Design: The overall design and user-interface really surprised me. My favorite color is the brown. The pictures don’t do it justice. But when you’re holding it in your hand there’s this warm, vintage look to it, like you’re cuddled up to your grandparents’ hi-fi, dropping needle to Herb Alpert groove. And the screen size puts Apple to shame I’m afraid to say.

The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.

Apple Computer Inc.’s new iPod Nano player has three Apple-marked chips of unknown origin, but no chip from PortalPlayer Inc., according to a Wedbush Morgan Securities report discussing a teardown of the long-awaited media player.

They speculate that because flash memory prices have fallen significantly in the last year, that Apple’s profit margins on the new Nanos could be significantly higher than last year’s.

Thursday, 14 September 2006

There are three view modes which are available through this new set of buttons – and it appears through this new set of buttons only. Strangely there are no corresponding items in the View menu, and thus no handy keyboard shortcuts – I’d suggest Command-1,2,3 just like in the Finder – for these new commands.

I agree that they should be menu commands in the View menu, but those shortcuts might conflict with user habits — ⌘1 and ⌘2 used to be the shortcuts for the main iTunes window and Equalizer windows, respectively. These shortcuts were removed when they moved the Equalizer command to View menu in iTunes 7.

Amongst a half dozen or so other observations (and a bunch of good links to commentary elsewhere that I’m about to steal), Michael Tsai points out this change in iTunes 7:

The right-pointing music store arrows are now shown only for the selected tracks. This makes it look a bit cleaner, but it’s an odd UI precedent.

I noticed this right away, and I think it’s a poor decision. Too cute. The circled arrows weren’t overly distracting in iTunes 6, so hiding them does not, in my opinion make the lists any less cluttered-looking. But because they’re now hidden, they’re also less obvious.

Excellent comprehensive review of the new iPod Nanos by Jeremy Horwitz. Includes this interesting tidbit:

In a direct comparison between current and past 4GB iPod nanos, however, we discovered that the new nano transfers at around one-half the speed of its predecessor: it took 4 minutes and 35 seconds for the old nano to transfer a 2.58GB file - incidentally, a full DVD image of Windows Vista - while the new one took 9 minutes and 15 seconds for the same file.

Horwitz also links to this gallery of photos from a disassembled new Nano, which shows that, as rumored, Apple is no longer using components from PortalPlayer. I’m wondering if the USB transfer performance hit is related to the switch away from PortalPlayer.

David Pogue covers Apple’s “Showtime” announcements, and he explains just what the deal is with the new earbuds that Jobs kept raving about:

On all of the iPods, Apple has done away with those easy-to-lose foam-rubber earbud mittens. Now the earbuds are ringed with rubber, which is supposed to form a better seal with your ear. Most people will find that the new earbuds sound better as a result. (Audiophiles will continue to sniff disdainfully.)

Wednesday, 13 September 2006

Later this year Intel will be introducing pin compatible upgrades to its Core 2 and Xeon lines, except instead of two cores these processors will feature four. Codenamed Kenstfield (Core 2) and Clovertown (Xeon), Intel’s new quad-core processors will dramatically increase the amount of processing power you can have in a single system. Given that the Mac Pro features two LGA-771 sockets, you could theoretically drop two Clovertown processors in there and you’d have an 8-core Mac Pro.

So they tried it with pre-release samples of the quad-core processors:

We grabbed a pair of 2.4GHz Clovertown samples and tossed them in the system, and to our pleasure, they worked just fine.

This has to be the biggest pre-event-speculation laugher of the week. The “iTunes” brand name is worth billions. And, as the Macalope pointed out yesterday, “Showtime” is already in use by a long-standing and popular premium cable network.

Tuesday, 12 September 2006

Joel Spolsky justifies Wasabi, Fog Creek’s homegrown programming “language” (which I put in quotes because it sounds to me like maybe Wasabi is more of a preprocessor for VBScript than it is a standalone new programming language).

iTunes 7.0 complains if you don’t yet have this installed. At this writing it’s only available as a standalone download — it isn’t showing up in Software Update yet. Update, 90 seconds after posting: It’s in Software Update now. Good old Murphy.

We are pleased to announce that all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property was recently sold to Apple. It has been incorporated into the latest version of iTunes.

Goes to show that when indie Mac developers do a terrific job, Apple will consider buying their work rather than re-implementing their idea. Weird, though, that there was a new version of CoverFlow released just five days ago. I also wonder how much work it was to port this to Windows.

Rare pre-announcement from Apple: their long-awaited TV set-top box is coming in early 2007. Code-named ‘iTV’, it will cost $299 and looks like a much-thinner Mac Mini, and yet has a built-in power supply so it doesn’t need a brick on the power cord. All sorts of cable ports for hooking up to your TV and stereo, but it grabs media — movies, TV shows, music — from your Mac or PC via Wi-Fi, and can also grab previews from the Internet. You navigate using an Apple Remote and a Front Row-style UI.

I’m thinking it has to have a hard drive in there for caching, but perhaps a gigabyte or two of flash memory is all it needs. Tech specs, as far as I can tell, aren’t yet available.

Patricia Dunn is stepping down as chairwoman of Hewlett Packard in the wake of the spying scandal, but will remain on the board. CEO Mark Hurd is taking over as chairman, and George A. Keyworth II, the company’s longest-serving director, has resigned from the board. Keyworth is the board member whose leaks to the press prompted Dunn’s cloak-and-dagger investigation.

An eBay auction benefitting the First Amendment Project, in Chris Ware’s own words:

The appearance in name and approximate drawn likeness, either as a ‘supporting character’ or more forthright personna, of the auction’s ‘winner’ in an upcoming comic strip by the author/cartoonist, to appear sometime before the end of 2008 in serial (probably newspaper) form, and later to be reprinted in collected form at an unspecified, and probably quite alarmingly later, date.

Nifty $15 utility by Brian Cooke; RooSwitch lets you switch between different “profiles” for application data. So, for example, you could create “Work” and “Home” profiles for an app like NetNewsWire — switching between RooSwitch profiles would allow you to switch between two entirely different sets of feed subscriptions.

Intel-compatible (but not yet a Universal binary) update to the premier screen capture utility for Mac OS X. Not exactly news — it shipped over two weeks ago — but I forgot to link to it then. I’m not using it on Intel hardware, but those who are claim performance is very good, including high frame rates for video captures.

Sunday, 10 September 2006

Saturday, 9 September 2006

So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can’t burn to DVD and can’t watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon. I love a lot of what you do, but I will absolutely not recommend this service.

iTunes Music Store fans certainly can’t complain about the fact that you have to download Amazon’s own player software, but installing a bunch of hidden startup processes is unseemly, even on Windows.

[Update: A couple of readers have pointed out that iTunes for Windows also installs hard-to-disable background processes (iTunesHelper and iPodService). Still seems like the reviews for Amazon Unbox are overwhelmingly negative, though.

If you’ve ever wondered what’s inside a pair of iPod earbuds, here’s your chance to take a look. Though Apple has gone through several different iterations of its now-famous pack-ins, this particular pair is from the batch shipped with the most recent iPods - nano and 5G.

Friday, 8 September 2006

Daniel Jalkut on why Carbon-vs.-Cocoa arguments and dogmatism are stupid:

Wake up people! It’s 2006. It doesn’t matter what you program in, it’s how you get the job done. Arguing about whether to use Carbon or Cocoa is like arguing about whether to use a net or a hook to catch a fish.

I have no idea what the app actually does (other than that it obviously has something to do with disc burning), and I’m not a big fan of teaser campaigns for vaporware, but I really like the look of this UI. It’s very much in the direction I think Apple is going to go with Mac OS X — flatter with less translucency. Keep your eye on Jasper Hauser.

Amazon announces Unbox, their movie/TV-show download service. I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that this came out just a few days ahead of Apple’s “Showtime” special event next week. The whole Unbox thing is based on Windows Media DRM, so it isn’t going to work on Macs or iPods.

Newsweek’s David A. Kaplan on the phone-records scandal at HP. An editor’s note at the end of the article disclaims that Kaplan is writing a book about Tom Perkins’s new $100 million yacht. (Via David Young.)

Aside from a modest amount of sprucing up, OmniWeb 5.5’s user interface is almost identical to its prior incarnations, which is fine by me; I was always comfortable with it. Mostly, though, this latest version feels fast and stable, something you couldn’t say about its immediate predecessors.

Major update to Bare Bones’s flagship text editor; $30 upgrade from version 8.0, $40 from older versions, and $125 for a new license. (Education pricing: $25 upgrade, $50 new license.)

New features include code folding (actually, text folding in general — you can manually fold text in any selection range; the “code” folding feature is that fold points are auto-generated for programming and markup languages), a revised UI for clippings (formerly known as glossary items), indented soft-wrapping, and, for us regular expression nerds, BBEdit’s regex engine has been updated to PCRE 5.0, which includes support for Python-style named sub-expressions.

New $16 “housecleaning” utility from Noodlesoft. Hazel lets you set up schedules and rules for automatically cleaning up folders with actions like moving, trashing, and archiving files and folders. (Via Daniel Jalkut.)

After a long public beta, the WebKit-based update to The Omni Group’s $30 web browser is finally out. (Previous versions of OmniWeb 5.x were based on a forked version of the lower-level WebCore rendering package; the result was that OmniWeb didn’t work with a lot of sites that did work with Safari.)

There is a list of the six confirmed Free Electrons that I know. Every six months I rewrite this list on a small yellow sticky to remind myself who these people are while also thinking if there are any new additions to the list. When I’m done, I fold the sticky into a small yellow square and swallow it.

Tuesday, 5 September 2006

Timothy Appnel on whether there’s a market for commercial Movable Type plug-ins. His answer, more or less, is “no”. I wonder if the problem is that Movable Type is losing so much momentum to WordPress?

The title is apparently Apple PR-speak for “Minimizing Mac Pro Fan Noise”, and the gist of their advice is that you should buy Apple’s RAM because “Apple FB DIMMs have an accurate, integral thermal sensor”.

Ends up Tucows was the purchaser of Kiko in last month’s eBay auction:

While there are a lot of little reasons, I’ll cover a few of
them in a moment, there is really one big reason why we bought
Kiko. We needed the functionality, quite desperately, inside of
our email platform and it was going to take us a long time to
get it. Especially at the level of sophistication Kiko has.

Monday, 4 September 2006

And his reply, which, notably, does not answer my simple question of whether they have found an exploit against the stock MacBook card and driver. Ellch writes:

As more patches come out (including Apple’s) we will release more details.
Out of respect for secureworks intellectual property, I don’t feel comfortable
commenting on the apple situation any more than I already have.

So he thinks Apple has a “patch” coming out, but won’t say whether they found an exploit against the stock AirPort card and driver.

[Wikipedia founder Jimbo] Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that’s not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.

FOUC stands for Flash of Unstyled Content. This situation occurs whenever a Web browser ends up showing your Web page’s content without having any style information yet. It’s an interesting technical problem, because when/how a browser ends up committing the crime of FOUCing depends heavily on how the browser’s engine is architected and on interesting assumptions made by Web site authors when designing their sites.

Ronald Grover, reporting for BusinessWeek, claims (a) that Apple is going to announce movie downloads ($15 for new movies, $10 for old ones) at the ITMS later this month; and (b) that Wal-Mart, the nation’s biggest DVD reseller, is pissed/scared about it.

This is funny, although I’m not sure if it’s funny “ha-ha” or funny “interesting”. Or both. What happened is that Joel Spolsky posted an essay titled “Language Wars”, wherein he recommends Java, C#, and PHP (and a half-hearted nod to Python) as web app development languages, not because they’re necessarily good but because they’re popular. And he pooh-poohs Ruby on Rails not because it isn’t good but simply because it isn’t long-established. But then at the end of his piece he claims that in-house at Fog Creek, they develop their flagship FogBugz app using “Wasabi”, their own in-house programming language and compiler. The contradiction here — of recommending Java/C#/PHP because they’re so widely used, vs. admitting that they themselves use a language no one else uses — led David Heinemeier Hansson to wonder whether “Wasabi” was a joke. (It isn’t.)

Friday, 1 September 2006

Since I’ve switched to using WriteRoom for almost everything, I have gone from being pitifully unproductive to being unproductive just to the point of ridicule. I find myself generating somewhere between double and triple my pre-WriteRoom writing output.

Meltzer obviously likes WriteRoom, and Merlin Mann has been asking for a full-screen-screen text-editing mode for ages, but I’ve never understood the need. If I’m trying to concentrate on my writing, I use Hide Others and quit distraction-prone apps like instant messaging clients. But there’s clearly demand for this, and it seems to work really well for some people.

Apple is pretty protective of the “Mac” name; I don’t think this name change was undertaken lightly. I agree with Jesper that this is a step toward making MacPorts the “official”, or at least “unofficially preferred” package manager for Mac OS X.